When it comes to travel bookings in the digital world of today, it would seem that bigger is not necessarily better! Where we mostly have been making travel and hotel bookings via our larger desktops, laptops and tablets, Americans are now using smaller mobile devices to make those bookings.

According to a mobile commerce study done by Criteo in early 2015, smartphones accounted for 34% of global eCommerce used to book travel in the US. Now, almost a year later, eMarketer travel research shows that trend steadily increasing finding that, of the Americans who book their flights and hotels this year, 51.8% will use mobile devices to do so. And there is every indication that mobile usage for bookings will continue to climb.

If there were ever a market indicator for this growing Smartphone usage, then it would be represented in Apple with their introduction to the market this month of a new smaller iPhone. Their “going smaller” is reflective of market demands, Apple explains in their presentation.

So what does all this mean to the hotelier?

Optimizing your website to accommodate mobile devices that will give consumers a smooth booking experience. A responsive website design ensures a great user experience every time because it adapts to any web browser and screen size. It will increase the chances that your site visitor will make the booking and be converted to a customer. After all, the goal here is to increase revenue!

Getting ahead of the competition by increasing your mobile search engine rankings. In April 2015 Google updated their algorithm to recognize mobile friendly sites and rank them higher than those sites that were not mobile compatible. Providing users easier access to high quality content was Google’s intention with this change and, with the growing use of mobile device bookings, you need to keep up so you don’t get left behind in the dust.

The times they are a changin’. Make sure your site is fully mobile-optimized so you keep the consumers interest and in readiness to make that final booking!